|
The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
With 4 Short Films:
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet
11 min. 2008
“I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. The film is culled from material I collected in Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. It is a homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. “ (LS)
Cuadro por cuadro (Frame by Frame)
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
8 min. 2009
In “Cuadro por cuadro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguayan media artists in Montevideo. Together, the group creates hand-painted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. They paint on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleach it and hang it to dry on the roof of the Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo.
The Task of the Translator
10 min., 2010
Sachs celebrates Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" through three studies of language and the human body.
"Sound of a Shadow"
10 min. Super 8, 2011
by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs
A wabi sabi summer in Japan – observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud.
| Catalog Number: MC-1237 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Documentary, Experimental |
| Copyright: 2011 |
Length: 01:08:00 |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC/EAN: 8 80198 12379 4 |
| Label: Lynne Sachs Films |
|
This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-1237 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Program MC-1237 may be licensed for Exhibition.
Films In Compilation
The Last Happy Day directed by
Lynne
Sachs
,
Documentary,
2011,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
01:08:00
The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war. Georgic for a Forgotten Planet
11 min. 2008
“I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. The film is culled from material I collected in Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. It is a homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. “ (LS)
Cuadro por cuadro (Frame by Frame)
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
8 min. 2009
In “Cuadro por cuadro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguayan media artists in Montevideo. Together, the group creates hand-painted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. They paint on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleach it and hang it to dry on the roof of the Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo.
The Task of the Translator
10 min., 2010
Sachs celebrates Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" through three studies of language and the human body.
"Sound of a Shadow"
10 min. Super 8, 2011
by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs
A wabi sabi summer in Japan – observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud.
|
 |
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet directed by
Lynne
Sachs
,
00:11:00
|
|
Cuadro por Cuadro directed by
Lynne
Sachs
,
00:08:00
|
|
The Task of the Translator directed by
Lynne
Sachs
,
00:10:00
|
|
Sound of a Shadow directed by
Lynne
Sachs
,
00:08:00
|
|
2012-03-15 Film and Media Department, UC Berkeley
By Jeffrey Skoller
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has invented a new form of poetic Documentary, melding the visual lyricism of personal avant-garde cinema with the investigative rigor of historical documentary. Her latest film, ‘The Last Happy Day’ is visually breathtaking and skillfully layered as it moves between past and present, between continents and across the generations of her own family. Sachs movingly explores the sorrows of a family member lost in the dislocations of World War 2, and the hope of a new generation discovering the richness of their family's past.
| Filmthreat.com
By David Finkelstein
A stunning essay film. Sachs uses this story as a lens for her meditation on trauma, survival, history and healing.
| The Jewish Week
By George Robinson
A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story ... a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.
| Chicago Filmmakers
By Todd Lillethun
Exquisite...Sachs reclaims (Lenard’s) dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to channel him back from the past.
| Mwmphia Commercial Appeal
By John Beifus
Sachs’ films are searching, inquisitive projects — quests of discovery (and self-discovery) that yield facts and insights that become even more meaningful when they are shared with audiences as art.
|
|
Investigation of a Flame by Lynne Sachs
MC-564, 2001
|
On May 17, 1968, three priests, a nurse, an artist and four others walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME is an intimate... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Lynne Sachs: 10 Short Films and Videos, Vol. 3
MC-724, 2007
|
10 Films:
“XY Chromosome Project” 12 min. 2007
“The Small Ones”, 3 min. video 2006
“Noa, Noa”, 8 min. 16mm, 2006
“Atalanta 32 Years Later” 5 min. video, 2006
“Tornado”, 4 min. video 2002
“Photograph of Wind” 4 min. 16mm, silent,... more >
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tales of Urban Fascination
MC-1159, 2010
|
Urban wanderings inspire these six experimental films ' from a collage of movie trailers found outside a Brooklyn theater, to an evocation of an Uruguayan poet's life as a bookkeeper, to a compendium of vox populi interviews gleaned from city... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Which Way is East - Notebooks from Vietnam
MC-465, 1994
|
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs' travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Wind in Our Hair
MC-1238, 2010
|
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves... more >
|
|
|
|
|
EU STORE 
Email this page to a friend
